Since his feature debut in 2008 with the impressive Hunger, starring Michael Fassbender, British director Steve McQueen has proven he’s not one to rush into a project as his latest release, his fifth feature, shows, coming six years after his last film, 2018’s Widows.

It’s a film, which he’s also written, based on a photo he found of a young black boy in London during WWII.

1940, and bombs are raining down over England’s capital. The German attack on London is so severe that children have to be evacuated to safer parts of the country.

And that’s exactly what happens to nine-year-old George (Elliott Heffernan), living in Stepney with his mum Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and Grandad (Paul Weller), when his mum has to send him off on a train for his own safety.

But as a mixed race child, his experience is far different from any other child on that train, so he decides to take matters into his own hands, with a fierce streak of independence that sets him on quite a journey.

As well intentioned McQueen’s film might have been, its execution is remarkably clumsy. He has proven in earlier films that he knows how to tell a story, but with this film it appears that he has unlearnt everything he did know.

It is a film supposedly about a young, mixed raced boy’s experience during a troubled time in his home town. But for some reason, McQueen often intercuts his experience with his mother’s, who is a truly disappointingly dull character. There are bombs falling out of the sky, and yet we must have a scene of Ronan, whose character makes bombs during the day and a singer at night, warbling in front of a crowd. There is nothing organic about the scene, in fact it feels like a contractual obligation made by the Irish star, that at some point she needs to be seen and heard singing in public. Box ticked. Not only does it not sit well tonally within the body of the film, it’s also not the kind of scene, or voice for that matter, to blow you away. If the film was released during the period the feature is set in, you could well imagine posters promoting it exclaiming “Saoirse sings!”, as if it were a big deal, which is most certainly isn’t. It is a role that is equally pointless and annoying, distracting from the young boy’s experiences.

It’s just one example of the director struggling for a consistent tone throughout, which he never gets to grips with.

You can’t help but feel that McQueen is trying to create his own version of Hope and Glory, but this lacklustre effort just doesn’t compare to John Boorman’s 1987 classic, based on similar themes. And although as a black director, who is keen to advocate for stories about the black community – as he did so confidently with the 2020 TV series Black Axe - many of his attempts to offer a rarely seen black point of view of this period in British history come across as amateurishly wedged in just for the sake of it, which only makes the film as a whole less cohesive.

Another example is the director’s constant swinging from being Disney-esque to Dickensian, especially with the woeful Oliver Twist elements opposite a Fagin-like character played by Stephen Graham, that would feel more at home in an amateur panto.

The only highlights would be the bright performance by the young Heffernan making his acting debut, and McQueen’s use of musical artists such as Weller, and Benjamin Clémintine and Celeste.

It is surprising how the director could make a film about a period that saw a capital suffer huge waves of destruction presented as nothing more as being a minor irritation; sure he covers bases with a number of shots of buildings turned to rubble, but you get no sense of trauma, or the death toll for that matter, facing the oppressed community.

In truth, it may as well have been Lassie and the Blitz, featuring as it does such a lazy, soulless and generic look at war.

His fifth film to date then, an exclusive for AppleTV+, is far from his finest two hours.